Second Thoughts

 “Sears revolutionized American retail not once but twice, and made a lot of Americans immeasurably better off,” Megan McArdle writes in Bloomberg. “But Sears built a great business for an America that no longer exists.” Sears, Roebuck was a good Illinois company that was lifted into greatness by a Springfield native and which reshaped life […]

Public Policy Polling has been peeking under the low brow of the American public again, and found that a great many Trump supporters live in a different United States than do their countrymen.  The survey found that 67% of Trump voters believe the unemployment rate went up during Barack Obama presidency, when in fact it […]

An update on the issue I raised here and here: The U.S. presidential vote is still being counted. As of December 6, Hillary Clinton leads by 2.6 million votes, which is 2 percent of the total. Donald Trump’s share is 46.2 percent. Kevin Drum notes, “Aside from the obviously corrupt election of 1876, no winning candidate in […]

Readers who share my dismay at the ways that the structure of our national political system frustrates the will of the majority have a sympathetic ear in blogger Jason Kottke, who offers links to useful video lessons in how the system works, or rather doesn’t work.  As Kottke says, Fairness and justice should not be […]

Among the original items in Mr. Rauner’s Turnaround Agenda (he counts 44, I get a little more than a dozen) are several sensible reforms that the saner Democrats ought to at least be talking about.  Alas, according to today’s news accounts, the governor he has settled on the two dumbest as his conditions for approval […]

Alert readers will know that two mid-Illinois writers, translator and poet Robert S. Fitzgerald and Lincoln novelists and editor William Maxwell, have been much talked about in these pages over the years. I essayed a piece about Fitzgerald’s boyhood in the capital (“All is not well forever”) in 2009 and in 2012 the late Rich […]

Rural America, even as it laments its economic weakness, retains vastly disproportionate electoral strength. Rural voters were able to nudge Donald J. Trump to power despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in cities like New York. In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold […]

For readers with a taste for the archival. Here is the full version of my column abut the Y block in downtown Springfield, an abridged version of which we ran on Nov. 10, The original that follows appeared in my Prejudices series in the IT of Oct. 8, 1981. Honestly, I didn’t know whether to cheer […]

 Note to baby boomers: Now’s your chance to relive the ’60s for real — only now Bull Connor is in the White House.

 Turns out the election was rigged, after all. Voters were asked to chose from among four candidates, and the one who was awarded the most votes was – Illinoisan Hillary Clinton. She lost, however, in the only tally that counts, the Electoral College. The college was set up by the Founders  as a political hedge. […]

 I just voted a few minutes ago, with pleasure and relief. Just visible n spite of the  smoke and mirrors was the fact that this was an election of the women, for the women and by the women. I fully expect by end of day that they will have saved the country, and finally realized […]